ZEK is a valid Scrabble word — 16 points
Yes. ZEK is accepted by every list we check: Collins, the North American lists and Words with Friends. It scores 16 points in Scrabble and 16 in Words with Friends.
Which word lists accept ZEK?
| Official Scrabble Players DictionaryUSA, Canada, Thailand | Valid |
|---|---|
| Official Tournament and Club Word ListUSA, Canada, Thailand | Valid |
| Collins Scrabble WordsEnglish in most countries | Valid |
| Words with FriendsZynga word list | Valid |
Word power: 50 / 100
Our own measure of how useful ZEK is to know. It scores 16 from 3 tiles, takes 1 hook, and its letters make up 4.7% of the bag. How this number is calculated
Hooks for ZEK
Front hooks — 0
None.
Back hooks — 1
zeksChecked against OSPD, TWL, CSW, WWF. Takes an S, so it hooks onto plurals easily.
How ZEK scores
Face value of the 3 tiles in ZEK, before any board multiplier.
Tiles you need
| Letter | Needed | In the bag |
|---|---|---|
| z | 1 | 1 |
| e | 1 | 12 |
| k | 1 | 1 |
Drawing exactly these 3 tiles as an opening rack: 1 in 13,475.
What stands out about ZEK
- At 16 points, ZEK is among the ten highest-scoring 3-letter words we list.
- ZEK averages 5.3 points a tile — one of 118 words that dense.
Counted from the four word lists we hold, not taken from anywhere else. How we calculate things
What does ZEK mean in Scrabble?
noun
historical
A prisoner in a Soviet labour camp.
Zek is clipped from a Russian bureaucratic abbreviation, and it reached English through the camp literature of the 1960s and 1970s. The word brings the system with it: it names not simply somebody in prison but somebody inside one particular machine, with its own language and its own arithmetic of survival.
How ZEK is used
Countable: a zek, two zeks. Chiefly in writing about the Soviet Union.
- The narrator is a zek and tells the story from inside.
- A zek learned the rules in a week or did not last a year.
- Two zeks shared a bunk and neither knew the other's sentence.
- The word zek carries the whole system in three letters.
- Memoirs of that decade use zek without translating it.
Written for this site: 1 meaning of ZEK and 5 example sentences, not copied from a published dictionary.
Words starting with ZEK
1 longer words begin with ZEK.
Words with ZEK inside
2 words contain ZEK in the middle. Words that start with ZEK are listed separately above, so nothing is repeated.
Shorter words from the letters in ZEK
Common questions about ZEK
- Is ZEK valid in Words with Friends?
- Yes. Words with Friends accepts ZEK, where it scores 16 points. That game keeps its own list, separate from the Scrabble dictionaries.
- How many points is ZEK worth?
- ZEK is worth 16 points in Scrabble and 16 points in Words with Friends.
- What does ZEK mean?
- A prisoner in a Soviet labour camp.
- What letters can be added to ZEK?
- ZEK takes 1 hook: 0 in front and 1 at the end.
Every word you can build from the 3 letters of ZEK:
Open ZEK in the Word Finder